Review: Smuin offers a fitting tribute to its founder

When Michael Smuin died while teaching a dance class 12 years ago this month, it wasn’t clear what would become of the founder’s eponymous company, or even that it would survive at all.

The silver-haired choreographer and director, whose career spanned classical ballet and Broadway, tango and tap, jitterbug and jazz, was a singular force, a consummate and sometimes brash showman who seemed to will things into being by the sheer force of his restless talent, personality and drive. Now that Smuin Contemporary Ballet (originally Smuin Ballet/SF) has been around almost as long without its creator as it was with him at the helm, the future seems assured.

The company made that point apparent on Friday, April 26, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, when “Renaissance,” a wonderfully liquid and purpose-built new work by longtime company stalwart Amy Seiwert, showed off the dancers’ athleticism, lyrical grace, expressiveness and ensemble cohesion.

The longer second half of the bill, “The Best of Smuin,” was devoted to a tribute retrospective to the director’s career. The Dance Series 02 program, which visits Walnut Creek, Mountain View and Carmel after its San Francisco run, closes the troupe’s 25th anniversary season.

Seiwert, artistic director of Sacramento Ballet, returned to the company that launched her choreographic career with a work inspired by the “women’s wall” protest in India earlier this year. In a grassroots protest demonstration for gender equality and other issues that stretched some 385 miles, millions of women stood together in solidarity. The linking of hands and bodies, the creation of tight but organically dynamic patterns, form the central impulse of “Renaissance.” By setting the work to Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, Macedonian and Russian Jewish melodies recorded by Kitka, the fine Oakland’s women’s vocal ensemble, Seiwert signals that the themes of communal empowerment aren’t culture-specific to India or anywhere else, but rather universal.

In the first of seven interlocking sections, five women are featured in a kind of stylized folk dance ritual. Crouches emphasize the power rising up from bare feet planted firmly on the ground. Hands shoot in unison up to frame faces. Heads snap back and forth on whip-like necks. Soon enough, as more women and men rush in from the wings, the dancers knit and twine themselves into ever-evolving formations. Some are like vines twisting together in time-lapse photography. Others have an innocent daisy-chain feel, as if children were making them up on a playground. One long, linear collapse and snuggle could be an outtake from the Rockettes.

Often, in the space of short transits across the stage, the dancers blend classical steps, folk dance moves and raw here-we-are physical presence. The performers dart on and offstage, destined to progress in slowly in the upstage distance later on. It all flows like a stream burbling over stones, diverted by rocks and recombining further on.

For all the inventive, sinuous connections it weaves, “Renaissance” has a certain grave and timeless feel to it. The costumes (by Kaori Higashiyama) and lighting (Brian Jones) create a dusky, earthy atmosphere. Three brown-bronze panels suggest a primeval forest. Over and over, whether they are linking hands or not, the dozen dancers keep turning toward each other, forming connections, matching and responding closely to each other’s steps and gestures.

In “Cradle Song,” Erin Yarbrough-Powell is like the swaying pendulum of a giant clock mechanism, devised and operated on the spot by her fellow dancers. In the next section, two couples seem to echo one another. Those pairs — Tessa Barbour and Peter Kurta, Lauren Pschirrer and Ian Buchanan — mirrored each other with a keen, natural precision on opening night.

The performances by the ensemble were of a uniform high order throughout. The final section, fittingly, circles back to the first, with those tight but springy gestures of the opening. In doing so “Renaissance” makes a final connection to itself, which only makes the circle grow larger and embrace us all.

Like the man himself, “The Best of Smuin” pours it on. Nineteen widely varied numbers come and go. Some are as short as a minute or two while others, like the charming balcony scene from “Cyrano,” unfold dramatically. The costume changes are perpetual.

Friday’s performance had hat tricks (Needham-Wood in “Heartbreak Hotel”) and a shameless lap dance with a folding chair (Erica Felsch in “Fever”), a tango and tango parody, a ridiculous and static female “Rodeo” with three women brandishing riding crops, and a trio of Gershwin numbers to close things off. Along the way, on four separate occasions, a movie screen descended with clips of company members offering praise to Smuin and the legacy he left.

It was all a bit much, by turns frantic and trudgingly encyclopedic, and could have been productively trimmed. Still, the dancing was often delicious, a box of sweets (and a few sours) that almost dared the watcher not to dig in and find something to savor. You don’t like an ethereal Bach pas de deux? Very well, how about something muscular and blunt from “Carmina Burana”? Or some ballroom dancing to those Gershwin tunes?

To quote the title of that suave and liquid number, spun out delightfully by Tess Lane and Kurta, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”